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Incubator Tool Library

A collection of vetted tools and resources to help impact incubators run smarter, scale bigger, and better support their entrepreneurs.

Pollinate Impact Tool Library

Welcome to your shortcut to the good stuff.

When we say “tool”, we mean anything that helps incubators thrive—software, templates, handbooks, or any resource that lets you level up your game. We’ve curated the best for impact incubators across the Global South, so skip the search, grab what you need, and get back to making magic happen. 

Share your tool! If you have a tool, template, or resource that others could benefit from, submit it for review. 

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The Hub Specialization Playbook

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This playbook covers the ten success factors to consider in your specialisation strategy.

  • Category: Incubator Design
  • Type: Handbooks

Organization: GIZ Make-IT in Africa

Mentoring Assessment Tools

Receive personalised feedback and clear recommendations on your assessment, as a mentor, mentee or mentoring program managers

  • Category: Enterprise Support & Portfolio Management

Organization: The Human Edge

Make the Most of Mentoring

Whether you’re actively seeking a new mentor or simply curious about the benefits of mentoring, our “Make the Most of Mentoring” course will equip you with the tools and strategies needed to succeed.

  • Category: Enterprise Support & Portfolio Management
  • Type: Trainings & Capacity Building

Organization: The Human Edge

Tips for Sourcing a Diverse Accelerator

Vilcap and IBM share the intentionally inclusive process of reaching founders outside their traditional networks, and using an inclusive and equitable diligence process in their cohorts. Here’s what we did differently – and what any decision-maker in tech: any investor, accelerator leader or corporation, can do to reduce implicit bias when they’re working with early-stage entrepreneurs.

  • Category: Pipeline Sourcing & Selection
  • Type: Best Practices & Lessons Learned

Organization: Vilcap & IBM

Creating an Impact Investment Ask

Diagnose a venture’s business growth readiness using a structured seven-element framework

Build a four-step impact management process aligned with investor expectations

Integrate business and impact insights to craft a compelling and credible investment ask

Communicate investment needs in a way that aligns with both financial and impact goals

  • Category: Enterprise Support & Portfolio Management
  • Type: Trainings & Capacity Building

Organization: CASE

Impact Investment Finance

What are impact investors looking for? This course offers a practical introduction to the impact investing marketplace. You’ll learn how the market is structured, including the roles of asset owners and asset managers, and how capital flows between them. The course explores how impact investors pursue both financial and social or environmental returns, and the different types of investors involved along with their motivations, constraints, and preferred investment vehicles.

  • Category: Enterprise Support & Portfolio Management
  • Type: Trainings & Capacity Building

Organization: CASE

Tools & Strategies | Identifying & Qualifying Deeply Aligned Funders

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Explore tips on how to shape funder research priorities and criteria to assess funder fit and uncover the information your organization needs to support this step in the fundraising process.

  • Category: Governance
  • Type: Trainings & Capacity Building

Organization: Black Fox Global

Actionable Strategies for Engaging your Board

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  • Category: Governance
  • Type: Trainings & Capacity Building

Organization: Black Fox Global

Grant Ready Communications

Tried and true strategies to ensure your organization is ‘grant ready’ when you do secure invitations to submit proposals and letters of inquiry (LOIs).

  • Category: Governance
  • Type: Handbooks

Organization: Black Fox Global

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Scaling and Replication: A way to grow your impact

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In this toolkit, you will find useful concepts and indications that can help you navigate
the replicability and scalability worlds. On the one hand, we’ve realized there is a need
for social entrepreneur support organizations (SESOs) to acquire techniques and tools to
integrate in their offer of technical services specific tools and methodologies to support
the social entrepreneurs (SEs) that are ready and mature enough, in their growth path.
On the other hand, this tool wants to be of support for the SEs that are interested in
understanding the different essential steps that need to be undertaken, to assess their
readiness to start a replicating or scaling strategy and to choose the best option to
achieve one of two growth options.

  • Category: Enterprise Support & Portfolio Management
  • Type: Toolkits

Organization: Impact Hub & MedUp!

Toward Inclusive Access: Navigating Gender and Disability Barriers in Entrepreneurship Support and Financing

This publication focuses on women entrepreneurs with disabilities’ access to business
support and financial resources. The objective is to increase economic opportunity for all
and foster inclusive growth. This report may be particularly useful for business development
organisations and financial service providers and investors, as well as policymakers seeking
to understand the interplay between gender, disability, and entrepreneurship.

  • Category: Enterprise Support & Portfolio Management
  • Type: Research

Organization: UN ESCAP & Impact Hub

Incubator Toolkit

Launching an incubation program for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) requires a strategic approach to nurture and accelerate their growth. The incubator Toolkit is designed to guide incubators in developing comprehensive programs tailored to the unique needs of these MSMEs. From initial assessment to post-incubation support, this toolkit equips you with methodologies and best practices, to foster innovation and improve their business capabilities. This toolkit empowers incubators to not only guide MSMEs towards success but also to adapt and evolve with the ever-changing business landscape, ensuring long-lasting impact & resilience.

  • Category: Incubator Design
  • Type: Toolkits

Organization: Instellar, Koalisi Ekonomi Membumi & SEED Indonesia

Smarter Systems Accelerator Implementation Guide

This implementation guide outlines three steps we found that accelerators
can incorporate into their selection processes to consistently evaluate all startups more
accurately.

  • Category: Pipeline Sourcing & Selection
  • Type: Handbooks

Organization: IFC / Vilcap / WeFi

Lessons from accelerators supporting women-led startups in emerging markets

This publication contains case studies, strategies, and practical advice from five accelerators and entrepreneur support organizations awarded by ScaleX for their successful efforts to help women-led startups in emerging markets overcome barriers and secure capital post-acceleration.

  • Category: Enterprise Support & Portfolio Management
  • Type: Best Practices & Lessons Learned

Organization: IFC

Enabling inclusive and empowering workplaces for migrant women through entrepreneurial support. A guide for Business Support Organisations

This toolkit is about equipping BSOs with principles, tools, activities and
methods that they can use with the entrepreneurs and ventures they support,
so that enterprises can make their workplaces more inclusive and empowering
for migrant women.

  • Category: Incubator Design
  • Type: Best Practices & Lessons Learned

Organization: Impact Hub

Embedding Circularity

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A practical learning journey for incubators and accelerators to integrate circular design principles into their entrepreneur support services. This online curriculum will help you identify ways to enable a more circular and sustainable economy by supporting startup and growth stage ventures to apply circular design principles early on.
You will also be generating a pipeline of innovation for key industries and value chains that need to become more circular to build for a just and sustainable society.

  • Category: Incubator Design
  • Type: Trainings & Capacity Building

Organization: Impact Hub

The Circularity Toolkit

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This toolkit offers insights, tools and methodologies for Entrepreneur Support Organizations (ESOs) to take a Circular Economy lens to their entrepreneur support programs, particularly incubators and accelerators, in order to mainstream circular design principles across small and growing businesses regardless of whether they are social, environmental or profit-driven.

You can use this toolkit to develop a program explicitly focused on supporting ventures with Circular Economy solutions, or to embed circular design principles into other programs that aren’t explicitly focused on the Circular Economy.

  • Category: Incubator Design
  • Type: Toolkits

Organization: Impact Hub

Incubation Tools and Templates

A collection of tools and templates that guide you in the process and activities of incubation as laid out in the Innovation Playbook by Villgro Philippines

  • Category: Incubator Design
  • Type: Toolkits

Organization: Villgro Philippines & USAID

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